Lyric and Narrative Consciousness in Eugene Onegin

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
Lyric and Narrative Consciousness in Eugene Onegin

Author(s): Craig Cravens
Source: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 46, No. 4 (Winter, 2002), pp. 683-709
Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages
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LYRIC AND NARRATIVE CONSCIOUSNESS IN
EUGENE ONEGIN
Craig Cravens, The University of Texas at Austin
In his comments on Eugene Onegin, Bakhtin considers Pushkin's

verse a typical novel (1981, 43-49). This article is not an attempt
Bakhtin's conclusions, but rather to demonstrate that the situatio
interesting and complex than Bakhtin assumes. It is Pushkin's ma
the forms of consciousness characteristic of the lyric, I will argu
allows him to create full and complete literary characters. One m
in mind that Pushkin was writing at a time before the great literary
ments in psychological Realism. Pushkin's own creation and pres
of consciousness is distinctly pre-Realistic and, I will argue, more
based than Bakhtin allows. By negotiating among the essentially
realms of author, narrator, and characters, Pushkin develops his c
psychologically as far as possible within the limits of his literary
creating characters that appear to exist independently from the
narrator's consciousness, but which do not constitute fully-embod
saic" consciousnesses. Eugene Onegin is indeed a "poet's novel," b
terms of formal markers alone.
By employing the lyric in a narrative situation, Pushkin exploits the
capacity of lyric poetry to express a state of mind and combines it with a
fictionally created character and world. Although writing in an era that did
not yet have fully rounded psychological prose characters, Pushkin's mas-
tery of the different genres of lyric poetry allows him to create different
authorial images or lyric personae which, when incorporated into the con-
text of his novel in verse, create psychologically convincing characters
distinct from the overarching consciousness of the author-narrator. In
short, by mixing the genres of lyric and novel, Pushkin creates an unprece-
dented type of psychological narration.
The narrator of Onegin is, to say the least, an idiosyncratic figure. Push-
kin at times (and most insistently in chapter 8) invites the reader to view the
narrator as an image of the author himself by attributing to him certain
autobiographical facts. At other times, he mitigates this view by pointing to
SEEJ, Vol. 46, No. 4 (2002): p. 683-p. 709 683
684 Slavic and East European Journal
the borders of the fictional world and stressing the artificiality of his literary
construct, so that the image of the narrator emerges as a vague and stylized
portrait of the author, comprising elements from the worlds-of both fiction
and reality.
In both guises, however, the narrator of Eugene Onegin is an authorita-
tive presence both omniscient and omnipresent. His temporal point of
narration is some years after the event he narrates; spatially and psychologi-
cally, however, he does not seek complete independence from his fictional
world. That is, he is in no sense a detached, objective observer of the type
we find in so many of the novels of later Realist writers. He is physically
present in parts of the story as Onegin's friend, and he does not hide his
psychological and emotional engagement with the characters whose lives
he relates - especially Tatiana's. This duality - the narrator's authoritative
presence above and beyond events, both spatially and temporally, com-
bined with his occasional physical participation in the events themselves
and his emotional engagement with the characters--is typical of first-
person narration.
In first-person narration, the reader's attention is usually divided be-
tween two spatio-temporal realms, that of the narrator and that of the
narrated events, and the narrational center of gravity oscillates between
them. In some first-person works, the narrative process itself dominates,
while in others it all but disappears so that characters and events of the
story absorb the reader's attention almost exclusively. In both cases, the
author combines two modes of experience in the single persona of the
narrator. As a character in the story, he is a fictional being within the
fictional world. This is the narrator's experiencing self. At the other end of
the spectrum we have the narrating self: the fictional present tense be-
comes past, and the narrator reflects on events with the benefit of temporal
distance and hindsight. Usually the narrator of a first-person novel oscil-
lates between these two perspectival modes depending on the effect the
author wishes to produce on the reader. The narrating self is of course still
fictional, but only from a point of view outside the text. Within the text, the
first-person narrator is "real." For this reason the German narrative theo-
rist Kate Hamburger (313) refers to first-person narration as a "feigned
reality statement [fingierte Wirklichkeitsaussage]."
This description of a first-person novel is appropriate to Eugene Onegin
only with some qualification. First of all, Pushkin's narrator directly partici-
pates in the fictional world in the first chapter only.1 For the rest of the
novel he functions as an omniscient third-person narrator located beyond
the fictional world. He often digresses from the fabulaic sequence of
events2 to relate information from his own biography, but after the first
chapter, these biographical allusions seem beyond the fictional pale of the
novel because the narrator is no longer embodied in the text. This points to
Lyric and Narrative Consciousness in Eugene Onegin 685
another feature of Onegin, which distinguishes it from conventional first-

person novels: the inclusion of elements of the real-life biography of the
author, which would have been immediately recognizable to his readers.
Later in the Realist period of the nineteenth century, authors often create
narrative personae, which are manifestly not identical with the author.
Pushkin, on the other hand, brazenly bares his biography in his work to
create a dynamic in the construction of character unlike that which we find
in most instances of later Realist fiction.
In the first-person novel of the Realist period- Dostoevsky's Demons is
a good example- when the narrator shifts from retrospective to immediate
narration, that is, when he participates in events, he tends to acquire char-
acter traits from the fictional realm he is narrating. The fictional mode of
existence is transferred to him, and he "becomes" a fictional character. He
enters the fictional realm and exists on the same plane as the other charac-
ters. In part, as a reaction to this altered center of gravity, the reader's
attention shifts to the fictional present tense, the time of events. At other
points, the narrator reflects on events from the retrospective pole, and
readers are compelled to view events likewise retrospectively.
This shifting of narrative modes within first-person narration is character-
istic of Eugene Onegin. Most of the story is told retrospectively from a
seemingly third-person viewpoint, but at times the narrator enters his fic-
tional world to become a character therein. Unlike the narrator of Demons,
however, Pushkin's narrator does not become fictionalized in his own narra-
tive. Conversely, I suggest, the fictional realm of the literary heroes be-
comes what we might call "biographized" by the real-life author. This
biographization is one of the elements Pushkin employs to create fictional
characters that seem to free themselves from their dependence on the
author.
In the Realist period of the mid-1800s, authors come to invent new
methods of creating apparently autonomous consciousnesses, of vivifying
characters. In Dostoevsky's works, for example, the author effaces himself
behind limited and delimited narrators, and characters appear to emerge as
beings independent of either author or narrator. Tolstoy, on the other
hand, employs a vocal authoritative narrator who is sometimes assumed to
be the author himself; his characters, however, likewise emerge as autono-
mous beings. Despite chunks of "event material" (Dostoevsky's mock exe-
cution, Tolstoy's marriage proposal), neither author's biography enters the
respective novels overtly. To be sure, Pushkin's own narrative persona in
Onegin possesses analogous elements; he is not coextensive with the au-
thor. The narrator at times appears to be confused by events, or to lose
track of his characters. At other times he is an omnipotent and omnipres-
ent being commenting on events or on the novel itself. Pushkin's method of
character construction, however, is in essence different from that of later
Realist authors. For example, while it would be unthinkable for a critic not
to distinguish the narrator from the author in Tolstoy's or Dostoevsky's
works, the term "author-narrator" with reference to Eugene Onegin is
quite common. Pushkin employs his own persona and biography in a way
later authors would find unacceptable. Let us look at some examples.
i. Autobiography
In general, Formalist and Structuralist criticism tends to stabilize the
relationship between author and narrator: the author is presumed to keep
his narrator at an ironic arm's length. In Onegin, however, Pushkin keeps
this distance in constant flux, now approaching, now receding from his
narrative persona. By packing his text with autobiographical references,
Pushkin envelops his novel in the larger extra-textual, real world of author
and reader, so that the worlds of fiction and reality are forced to intersect.
Already in the second stanza, Onegin is introduced as the hero of the novel
and simultaneously as the friend of the author-narrator who teases the
reader with the possibility he is Pushkin himself (or a simulacrum thereof)
at the end of the stanza by commenting on his own real-life exile to the
Crimea: "No vreden sever dlia menia [But the north is harmful for me]."
Later in the chapter, the narrator himself appears as a character in a remi-
niscential section of the text as the friend of Onegin. He in fact becomes a
fictional character. The reader, too, is mapped onto the fictional plane of
the novel through the author-narrator's constant apostrophizing. For exam-
ple, the author-narrator suggests in the second stanza that the reader and
the novel's hero may have been born in the same place, "Gde mozhet byt'
rodilis' vy [Where perhaps you were born]." More subtly in the same
stanza, he rhymes moi priiatel' [my friend], meaning of course Onegin, with
chitatel' [the reader], and thereby introduces a covert semantic consan-
guinity between protagonist and reader. Thereby, three different worlds -
the worlds of the character, author, and reader-come to exist intermit-
tently on the same plane; at the same time, however, they exist separately
in their own spheres. The "I" of the novel as a friend of Onegin (and
perhaps acquaintance of the reader as well) is not identical to the biographi-
cal author. However, he is presented as such, and therein lies the contradic-
tion. Dynamically and irregularly the author-narrator mixes the worlds of
reader, author, and character. Fixed borders collapse, and life overflows
into and animates art and vice versa.
This almost mechanical mixing and intersecting of levels is one way
Pushkin brings his world to life. It is not, however, unique to Pushkin. As
is often remarked, the principle of authorial interference was quite com-
mon in the tradition of Enlightenment Realism (El'sberg 257). We may
also look to European Sentimental and Romantic literature for closer
sources of influence. Constant, Richardson, and especially Byron likewise
created characters by projecting their own personalities onto the page. For
these authors, the dominant mode of literary creation was not mimetic
narration whereby an author creates a world similar to, yet distinct from,
the real one. Nor did they create third-person, seemingly autonomous
beings distinct from themselves. Rather, authors produced stylized self-
portraits. Authorial subjectivity projected onto third-person narration, the
emotional engagement of the narrating voice, and the ambiguous bound-
aries between life and art are all characteristic of European Romantic
literature. The Romantic hero emerged when the reader postulated the
existence of the literary hero's alter ego, that is, the author, in real life
(Zhirmunskii, Greenleaf). When these writers projected themselves into
the fiction, they discovered a whole range of psychological complexity and
narrative possibilities.
This reveals a significant preoccupation of pre-Realist literature: the
problem of creating characters who appear to exist and think on their own,
independently of the narrator or author. In the aforementioned works, the
author or narrator is the only excogitating consciousness upon which other
characters appear to feed. Direct inside views are restricted to first-person
forms--the epistolary novel, the confession--while third-person works
concentrate on external behavior - action rather than attitude.
Pushkin also employs the Byronic interpretation of life and art as well as
a vocal, authoritative narrator: in the main, he uses external descriptions
that rely heavily on the use of cultural conventions and stereotypes. Yet he
succeeds in creating characters who seem to free themselves from the
subjective element, from the authorial or narratorial "I." One key to Push-
kin's achievement, I suggest, is the lyrical essence of his work, which, in
ways I will try to demonstrate below, frees the characters from the author-
narrator's control.
ii. Lyric and Narrative

From a narrative perspective, the device Pushkin employs to portray his
characters psychologically is free-indirect discourse. Pushkin describes a
character's cognitive and emotional life by having his author-narrator
speak in the words and intonations of the character while the narrator
technically remains outside, speaking grammatically in his own voice. A
brief example from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist [1916] demon-
strates how this type of narration traditionally functions in prose:
He halted suddenly and heard his heart in the silence. How far had he walked? What hour was
it? (189)
The first sentence is a standard narrational description, whereas the two

following incorporate the character's emotional and interrogative diction -
they seem to issue from the character's mind--but they retain the third-
person reference to the character and the standard past tense of narration.
While grammatically belonging to the narrator, emotionally they belong to
the character. Roy Pascal calls this mode of narration a "dual voice, which,
through vocabulary, sentence structure, and intonation subtly fuses the two
voices of the character and the narrator" (26). Bakhtin's concept of voice
zones elaborates the dualistic nature of free-indirect discourse. According
to Bakhtin, each character has his own voice zone [rechevaia zona], "his
own sphere of influence on the authorial context surrounding him, a sphere
that extends--and often quite far--beyond the boundaries of the direct
discourse allotted to him" (1981, 320). Within these zones, a given char-
acter's speech patterns and modes of expression dominate. At different
times, the narrator, author, or other characters may enter a character's
zone and speak from within it, that is, employ that character's mode of
speaking, thinking, and expression without erasing the boundary between
the two speech centers. This rich and flexible "quoting without quotation
marks" [bez kavychek] is, according to Bakhtin, among the most common
means of transmitting inner speech in the novel (1981, 319). It allows the
author's voice to merge with the character's while at the same time preserv-
ing its own expressive contours; that is, one still recognizes the presence of
two voices. For the general reader, free-indirect discourse is barely discern-
ible; in fact, its effect depends on its being almost unconsciously appre-
hended as a distinct type of narration.
In the history of fiction, free-indirect discourse occurs occasionally in
eighteenth-century novels, where it is often difficult to distinguish from
mere narrative commentary. It is when the novel begins to turn inward,
during the Realist period of the nineteenth century, that this discourse type
becomes common and requires more rigorous delineation.
Pushkin's narrator in Onegin is not the dimmed personality of later
Realist fiction, who silently enters a character's psyche and portrays it from
within. He is as vociferous and intrusive as Fielding and Sterne who only
sporadically resort to free-indirect discourse. It is Pushkin's mastery of the
lyric and poetic form that allows him his distinctly accurate and well-
focused access to - and creation of- a character's psyche.
iii. The Lyric3

Toward a definition of the lyric, it will be helpful to begin convention-
ally--by contrasting it to narrative. The contrast between lyric and narra-
tive is of long-standing derivation. It is commonly held that narrative fore-
grounds sequence and metonymy, and lyric foregrounds simultaneity and
metaphor (Jakobson). Narrative concentrates on story, lyric on a state of
mind or cluster of feelings. The lyric presents a speaker's subjective experi-
ence and asks the reader to adopt the speaker's perspective. The speaker is
present in the lyric not only as the author, not only as the subject of
representation, but also as its object, included in the aesthetic structure;
the speaker's own feelings are the subject matter of the lyric utterance. The
conception of poetry in general as non-mimetic became widespread during

the Romantic period in Europe when the presentation of the more visceral
life of the poet displaced the rationalist, Neoclassical poetics of mimesis
and genre hierarchies. Poets sought expressions of emotion rather than
reproductions of surroundings (Abrams 50). Lyric expression was per-
ceived as authorial self-projection, and most Romantic critics agreed that
the origin of lyric poetry was in passionate utterance rather than, as Aris-
totle had assumed, an instinct for imitation (Abrams 101). In the lyric, the
poet is at the center, and by the late eighteenth century, it had become the
epitome of the purest poetry in English and German aesthetic theories,
thereby challenging Aristotle's mimetic theory of art (Abrams 88-89). This
widespread shift in aesthetic theory had its effect on the development of
theories of cognition as well.
The revolution in epistemology made famous in philosophy by Kant
(that the mind imposes the forms of space and time on the external world -
or, expressed more generally, that the perceiving mind discovers what it has
itself partly made) occurred among Romantic poets before it became wide-
spread in academic philosophy (Abrams 58). What was "real" for a Euro-
pean Romantic was a subjective attitude toward the world rather than a
mimetic reflection of it. Reality was created in the mind of the subjective
consciousness. The subject matter of a lyric is a subjective attitude toward
reality, which for Kant and the Romantics is closer to actual epistemologi-
cal functioning than narrative mimesis.
Besides subjective expression, another widely-acknowledged aspect of
the lyric is its universality, for even though it is the most subjective form of
literature, it always strives for the general, to depict spiritual life as universal
(Levin). The lyric encourages the reader to identify with a single point of
view, but the point of view is presumably to be nearly universally accessible.
Lyric poetry is by no means always the direct speech of the poet about
himself and his feelings, but it is always an exposed point of view; it displays
the relation of a lyric subject to its surroundings. The reader is invited to
identify with the speaker's viewpoint and emotionally engage reality as does
the speaker. In narrative, on the other hand, the word is used denotatively to
create a fictional reality that pre-exists the utterance. The mimetic function
of narrative is replaced by the expressive function of lyric. And thus we
arrive at the paradoxical conclusion that readers apprehend the lyric utter-
ance as they would a real utterance and not a fictional one, a paradox
because the lyric "owes less" to reality and is less constrained by it.4
iv. Lyric in the Novel

Onegin is a work both narrative and lyric. In the main, it foregrounds
plot or narrative to create a fictional reality of characters and events. At
numerous points, however, the lyric impulse comes to the fore, and the
speaker expresses a lyrical, subjective attitude. Most Russians, for exam-

ple, recognize the lyric lament of spring in 7.ii. as Pushkin's poetry, but
many are hard put to name the work it comes from. This is because it
stands on its own when excerpted from the novel. The narrator often
digresses into lyrical passages such as this one where the continuity of
action, or narrative, is suspended. Here, utterances become more self-
referential and less directly descriptive or communicative. The speaker's
attitude toward "reality," whether it be fictional or non-fictional, is fore-
grounded. Furthermore, the lyric and narrative modes are of different
temporal orders: the narrative sections tell a story and move forward in
time, while the lyric sections seem to exist beyond this chronological realm
as static entities. These interludes are detachable from the main action of
the story and mark no passing of time.5 As the narrative function changes,
so do the reader's reactions. The desire for narrative mimesis is suspended,
and the lyric portions are apprehended as if they were lyric poetry.
The reader perceives the lyric and novelistic sections of Onegin on two
different levels - the lyric interludes as subjective expressions of a real con-
sciousness, and the novelistic sections as the creation of a fictional reality.
The two levels of the work, however, do not always remain separate. Often
the subjective, lyric impulse is ascribed to a created fictional character, and a
paradox arises. If we apprehend the lyric statements as subjective expres-
sions of a real consciousness - as one does in the lyric outside of the novel -
then, in a sense, we have a case of a fictional character uttering non-fictional,
subjective lyric statements. As in the lyric on spring, these statements can be
removed from the work and read as lyric expressions on their own, yet in the
novel they are uttered by a fictional character. This is one way Pushkin
creates the illusion of cognitive function - what might be called the autono-
mous intelligence - of his characters.
Often during the lyric sections of Eugene Onegin, the lyric "I" is sup-
planted by a fictional one which assumes a life of its own. Through free-
indirect discourse, the lyric "I" attaches itself to a character and poses as a
subjective attitude toward the fictional reality. Here, to take one outra-
geously famous example from chapter 1, the narrator appears to digress
from his fabula to relate a maxim concerning what at first appears to be his
own world-weariness:
KTO XKH H MbICJIHJI, TOT He MOKCeT

B yiyme He npe3HpaTb niioeii;
KTO HyBCTBOBaJI, TOrO TPeBO)KHT
IpH3paK HeB03BpaTHMbIX RHeH:
ToMy ysK HeT oqapOBaHHH,
Toro 3MHWS BOCIIOMHHaHHA,
Toro pacKasHbe rpbI3eT.
Bce 3TO MaCTO nipHgaeT
Boaibmyro npenecrb pa3roBopy.

CnepBa OHerHHa SI3bIK
MeHI cMyula.: HO A npHBbIK
K ero 3sBHreaJIHoMy cnopy. (1.xlvi)
He who has lived as thinking being

Within his soul must hold men small;
He who can feel is always fleeing
The ghost of days beyond recall;
For him enchantment's deep infection
Is gone; the snake of recollection
And grim repentance gnaws his heart.
All this, of course, can help impart
Great charm to private conversation;
And though the language of my friend
At first disturbed me, in the end
I liked his caustic disputation.6
We take this to be the lyric "I" of the narrator until the lines, "Sperva
Onegina iazyk / Menia smushchal; no ia privyk / K ego iazvitel'nomu sporu
[And though the language of my friend / At first disturbed me, in the end / I
liked his caustic disputation]," which reveal the preceding to be the subjec-
tive expression of Onegin's lyric "I." The lyric portion portrays and
thematizes a character's engagement with reality, his own subjective experi-
ence, through free-indirect discourse. None of the stanza is presented in
quotation marks to signal Onegin's voice, but the last two lines betray the
vocal origin. This brief lyrical section creates for the reader Onegin's im-
age, his internal life, in a way not possible through a direct presentation of
a character's thoughts in the author's own "objective" voice. The passage
does not merely describe thoughts; it rather illustrates and thematizes a
way of cognizing the world, of engaging reality. The view is subjective as
well as general, and the passage invites the reader to enter and share this
point of view. The personality, however, is a constructed one with a
forward-moving biography of its own.
First of all, the universality of these lyric passages invites the reader to
participate in the speaker's emotion and identify with the point of view
expressed. Instinctively, the reader internalizes the lyric. In this way, Push-
kin allows the reader access to a subjective mind. Subsequently, the author
attaches the lyrics to a fictional character to create the illusion of an autono-
mously acting and thinking being. Precisely crossing this boundary between
codes is characteristic of Pushkin's highly sophisticated manipulation of the
genre conditions of Romanticism.
The depersonalization and decontextualization characteristic of the lyric
is impossible in the traditional novel, since one of its defining characteris-
tics is specificity of place and time. The Realist novel conventionally oper-
ates by developing a recognizable fictional world distinct from the reader's
own. The novelistic world comes to life outside the reader's soul--it is
grounded in a specific time and place.
The universality of the lyric allows Pushkin to attach it to a certain
character in a certain situation. A curious aspect of Pushkin's lyrics in
general is that, although they create a definite authorial image, this imag
shifts with each genre of poem. Lidia Ginzburg notes an absence of
single, central image, the absence of a lyrical hero in Pushkin's poetry as
whole. No such unity, according to her, can emerge from Pushkin's mult
faceted and multi-thematic verse. Rather, it contains an internal unity o
the author's point of view, an intensely developing unity, in which Pushk
projects various embodiments of his authorial "I" (182).
According to Ginzburg, Pushkin passed through many stages of poet
development and in each stage created a distinct authorial "I." Pushkin'
easy mastery of each genre and style of poetry contributed to his reputation
for proteanism. In Onegin, Pushkin uses the shifting authorial image o
each genre by attaching it to a different character. For example, Pushki
initially endows Tatiana with the Sentimental image and Onegin with th
Byronic, but these poetic authorial images, as we shall see, evolve through
out the novel. Pushkin's poetic narration thereby creates not only distin
tive, recognizable characters independent from the author, but also type
associated through genre. Let us examine another example.
In the following passage from chapter 2, Lensky visits the grave of Olga's
father and meditates on death. Here, rather than a character assuming th
narrator's lyric "I," the narrator displaces the character's, with all the
requisite shifts and redefinitions of authority.
"Poor Yorick! MOJIBHI OH yHbIJIO,

OH Ha pyKax MeHSI epxcai.
KaK qaCTO B geTCTBe AI rpan
Ero OqaKOBCKOA MenaibIO!" (2.xxxvii)
"Poor Yorick!" then he murmured, shaking,

"How oft within his arms I lay,
How oft in childhood days I'd play
With his Ochakov decoration."
Lensky's direct discourse is, of course, signaled by the quotation marks. In

the subsequent stanza, the narrator continues Lensky's thought grammati-
cally in his own (the narrator's) voice:
H TaM Ke HanIIHCblO neqaJnbHoi

OTUa H MaTepH, B cJIe3ax,
rIOqTHJI OH npax naTpHapxanbHbIl ...
YBbI! Ha XaH3HeHHbIX 6pa3Aax
MrHOBeHHOI )KaTBOfi nOKOJIeHbSI,
lo TafgHOfi BoJe npOBHgeHb6,

BocxoAr.T, 3peIOT H nalayT;
XpyrHe HM BocJieg HAyr ...
TaK Hame BeTpeHoe niieMa
PacreT, BOJIHyeTCa, KHnHT
H K rpo6y npaAeosB TecHHT.
ripHieT, npHAeT H Hame BpeMS,
H HamILI BHyKH B 1o6pbift qac
H3 MHpa BbITeCHiT H Hac! (2.xxxviii)
And then with verse of quickened sadness

He honored too, in tears and pain,
His parents' dust ... their memory's gladness ....
Alas! Upon life's furrowed plain-
A harvest brief, each generation,
By fate's mysterious dispensation,
Arises, ripens, and must fall;
Then others too must heed the call.
For thus our giddy race gains power:
It waxes, stirs, turns seething wave,
Then crowds its forebears toward the grave.
And we as well shall face that hour
When one fine day our grandsons true
Straight out of life will crowd us too!
The stanza continues the lament of the passing of generations begun by

Lensky. Grammatically, the narrator seems to speak, but Lensky's elegiac
tone, his voice zone, dominates. The next stanza moves closer yet to the
author-narrator's "I."
rIOKaMecTb ynHBaftTecb elo,

Cefi nerKofi )KH3HHIO, Apy3ba!
Ee HHITO)KHOCTb pa3yMeIo,
H MaJIo K Heft nIpHB3aH i;
Jl, npiH3paKOB 3aKpbIJIa BexcbI;
Ho OTanJieHHbie HaAeieKbI
TpeBoxaT cepJuie HHorla:
Be3 HenpHMeTHoro cniega
MHe 6bIo 6 rpycTHO MHp ocTaBHTb.
)KHBy, nHrmy He Rni noxsan;
Ho A 6bi KaxeTCs xKenan
Ile,aanbHbl x)Kpe6Hi CBOHI npocJIaBHTb,
XTo6 o60 MHe, KaK BepHbhfi gpyr,
HanoMHHJI XOTb eAHHbIlt 3ByK. (2.xxxix)
So meanwhile, friends, enjoy your blessing:

This fragile life that hurries so!
Its worthlessness needs no professing,
And I'm not loathe to let it go;
I've closed my eyes to phantoms gleaming,
Yet distant hopes within me dreaming
Still stir my heart at times to flight:

I'd grieve to quit this world's dim light
And leave no trace, however slender.
I live, I write - not seeking fame;
And yet, I think, I'd wish to claim
For my sad lot its share of splendor -
At least one note to linger long,
Recalling, like some friend, my song.
The lyric "I" is now the narrator's (and, by stylized extension, Pushkin's),
who expatiates on the elegiac theme begun by Lensky. He augments
Lensky's slightly comic lament with his own more serious philosophical
lyricism,7 and ends by referring to his own creation to remove any doubts
the reader may have had as to the identity of the speaker:
H ibe-HH6y/6b OH cepxge TpOHeT;

H coxpaHeHHaAs cyYb60t,
BbITb MOKeT B JIeTe He HOTOHeT
CTpo4a cjaraeMaa MHOA;
BbITb MOweT (jiecTHaS HaARewa!)
YKaxKeT 6yxyumkH Hesewcga
Ha MOA npocjaaBeHHbIA nopTpeT,
H MOJIBHT: TO-TO 6bIJI Io0T! (2.xl)
And may it touch some heart with fire;

And thus preserved by fate's decree,
The stanza fashioned by my lyre
May yet not drown in Lethe's sea;
Perhaps (a flattering hope's illusion!)
Some future dunce with warm effusion
Will point my portrait out and plead:
"This was a poet, yes indeed!"
The "I" of the stanza belongs clearly to the narrator who broadens, modi-
fies, and brings down to earth Lensky's image by transferring it into the
realm of his own poetic "I" and supplementing it with his own lyric world
view and presumed life experiences. The scene is originally set in a narra-
tive, fictive situation, but it gradually moves into the realm of lyric and the
"I" of the narrator, whereby Lensky's image acquires more facets and
complexity. Onegin, Tatiana, and Lensky are all subject to similar lyric
narration where the narrator's voice displaces or, depending on the char-
acter, mixes with the character's voice.
In the case of Onegin and Lensky, the narrator describes and creates his
narrative, fictional world, and at moments he shifts to a lyric "I," employ-
ing the fictional world in the same way any lyric "I" would employ non-
fictional reality, that is, as a pretext for his self-referential lyric dilations.
When the identity of the lyric "I" shifts to that of a character, the reader
initially apprehends this "I" as he does the poetic "I" of a real person, but
he subsequently realizes that the "I" is a character created by Pushkin. The
reader participates in a character's emotions expressed lyrically, but soon
realizes that the poet is speaking through a created self. Through the cre-
ated character, the poet finds an emotion corresponding to a private emo-
tion of his own. He is able to express a sentiment he otherwise could not, or
did not choose to, express in his own voice, since the mediation of a created
consciousness dissociates him from the emotion.8
What makes this shifting of speakers' identities possible in Eugene
Onegin is an inherent feature of the lyric--the difficulty of determining
definitively and exclusively who is speaking, whether it be the author,
narrator, character, and when, where, and to whom he is speaking. As
Sharon Cameron notes, generalizing on this phenomenon, "In lyric, the
speaker's origin remains deliberately unspecified, unlike characters in nar-
ratives, whose first task is to particularize themselves" (208). Lyric speak-
ers are non-specified and generalized--they seek epochal and trans-
historical expression and characterization. (Compare this chronotope to
that of the novel, where the significant features are particularity of descrip-
tion, characterization, and placement in a concrete time and space (Watt
17-18)). In short, the lyric voice is a shifter--all depends on the point of
view from which the lyric is uttered. But it is a shifter that can literally bond
to anything and start to speak (unlike novel voices). The speaker of a lyric
has no background. Hence, the shift from one lyric "I" to another in
Onegin does not cause the dissonance one would sense were the speaker's
identity in a novel to change.
The non-specificity of speaker and addressee in lyric reveals a significant
difference between the functioning of free-indirect discourse in prose and
lyric, and can help us see how lyric characterization differs from character-
ization in a novel. Let us view the thesis from a Bakhtinian perspective.
Since the identity of the speaker of a lyric is unspecified, one cannot
distinguish the two distinct voices of the "dual voice" of free-indirect dis-
course as one can in narrative. Free-indirect discourse in prose relies on the
presence of two voices, or more accurately, voice zones.
In contrast, the instances of quasi free-indirect discourse just described
in Onegin express only one voice. Due to the non-specificity of the lyric
voice, irony or sympathy from the narrator emerges only after or before a
character's lyric passage, never within. Such a reading helps us see why
Bakhtin would characterize poetry as single-voiced (1981, 286). If the lyric
speaker is unspecified and undifferentiated, a second voice within or along-
side would likewise have to be unspecified. For this, surely, is a corollary to
the dialogic principle: that two voices cannot coexist as autonomous voices
expected to interact, if neither is distinguished. The narrator enters the
voice zone of his character (a lyric voice zone) and expresses himself from
within that zone as if he were the character. Two voices, however, are not
heard within a single utterance. Only one resounds, the identity of which is
later revealed to be that of author-narrator or character.
Pushkin, through his narration, employs this psychological method to
characterize chiefly Onegin and Lensky. The world views of these two
characters are best expressed by the universalizing and isolating genre of
the lyric. Tatiana's psyche and structured role in the work is more complex,
and here we encounter a different method of psychological portrayal.
v. Tatiana
The narrator's attitude toward Onegin and Lensky is one of almost
locker-room camaraderie. He speaks of them from the point of view of a
boon companion, of one who has experienced similar stages of life. He
knows Lensky's Romantic sentiment, Onegin's splenetic Byronism, and
although all three characters seem to be at different points in their develop-
ment, their progression is along the same trajectory and through the same
life experiences.
The narrator's attitude toward Tatiana, by contrast, is protective, and he
appears hesitant, even reluctant, to narrate her. As has often been pointed
out in the literature, Tatiana is initially characterized chiefly by her dissimi-
larity to her sister:
HH KpacoToA ceCTpbI CBOel,

HH cBexecrboK ee pyMaHOlA
He npHBjeeKia 6 oHa oqei.
[...]
OHa JnacKaTTbcS He yMeJia
K OTRy, HH K MaTepH CBoeif. (2.xxv)
Neither with her sister's beauty

Nor with her rosy freshness
Would she attract one's eyes
[. ..]
She never learned to show affection,
To hug her parents -neither one.9
Such negative physical characterization suggests qualities of Tatiana that

elude direct and precise description. Moreover, it anticipates the narrator's
psychological depiction of her.
Unlike his lyric portrayal of Onegin's psyche and despite her superficially
more "lyrical" nature, the narrator will not or cannot speak directly for
Tatiana: he will not express her thoughts or attitude through lyric free-
indirect discourse or any other type of narration that creates the impression
that he knows her. This does not imply, of course, that she has no discern-
ible psychic life or that she is not a psychologically convincing or complex
character. She has, in fact, the most complex, developed, and dynamic
mental life and world view of any of the characters, which requires differ-
ent and more subtle narrative means.
Similar to the vocal dynamic we saw in the example from Joyce, Push-
kin's presentation of Tatiana's inner life relies on the subtle intertwining of
the voices of narrator and character. In Onegin, however, this character's
voice emerges from and begins to define the narrative texture of the work,
so that the reader senses more strongly her presence than that of any other
character.
Here we move closer to Bakhtin's reading of Eugene Onegin. Although
one does not sense the presence of two voices in the lyric passages Bakhtin
cites as double-voiced (1981, 43-50), other passages do in fact contain two
vocal origins, and most of these passages pertain to the heroine. Tatiana's
voice becomes the object of representation, but at the same time it repre-
sents her in her own characteristic style.
Often in the narrative passages of the novel, the narrator speaks as if
from the point of view of the character he is describing. He does not
express a general world view-as he does with Onegin and Lensky-but
describes a specific situation inseparable from the fictional world. In the
following passage, the tense of the verbs is the standard past tense of
narration, whereas Onegin's lyrics fall out of the action in part due to the
verbal present tense. Here Tatiana has written and sent the fateful letter to
Eugene and awaits his reply:
14 Me)Iy TeM gymua B Heft HbIJIa,

H cJIe3 6bI nOJIOH TOMHbIii B30p.
B,pyr TonoT! . . KpoBb ee 3acTbIJIa.
BOT 6iiiKe! cKayr ... H Ha aBOp
EsreHHfi! <Ax!> -H j ner'e TeHH
TaTbHHa npbIr sB pyrHe ceHH,
C KpbiJIbn a Ha RBOP, H npSMO B cag,
JIeTHT, JIeTHT; B3IrIHyTb Hasaa
He cMeeT; MHrOM o6excaIa
KypTHHbI, MOCTHKH, JI)KoK,
Anjieio K o3epy, JecoK,
KycrbI CHpeH nepeJIoMaJia,
Io uBeTHHKaM JIeTI K py'bIO,
HI, 3aabixaacb, Ha CKaMbIO (3.XXXViii)
And all the while her soul was aching,

Her brimming eyes could hardly see.
Then sudden hoof beats! . . Now she's quaking.
They're closer! coming here . . . it's he!
Onegin! "Oh!" -And light as air,
She's out the backway, down the stair
From porch to yard, to garden straight;
She runs, she flies; she dare not wait
To glance behind her; on she pushes -

Past garden plots, small bridges, lawn,
The lakeway path, the wood; and on
She flies and breaks through lilac bushes,
Past seedbeds to the brook - so fast
That, panting, on a bench at last.
Notice how the two exclamations grammatically voiced by the narrator

"Vdrug topot! [. . .] Vot blizhe! [Then sudden hoof beats! [.. .] They're
closer!]" reflect Tatiana's anxiety. Not only do the exclamations seem to be
generated from Tatiana's perspective, but the rushed cadence of the whole
stanza (characterized by frequent enjambments that, significantly, run on
to the next stanza with the fateful and Biblically-laden verb Upala [She
fell]) reflects her physical and emotional situation and its whole liminal
vulnerability. Here we see the narrator's fundamental method of character-
izing Tatiana psychologically: in many of the narrative passages relating to
Tatiana, the narrator speaks from her viewpoint using her words and man-
ner of speaking, yet the narrator's own voice is always present alongside.
He sees her and can contextualize her fate. This insinuates her voice and
presence into the fabric of the narrative world.
In the early descriptions of Tatiana, the narrator uses this method with a
shade of irony; he predicts and presumes knowledge. In the following
passage from chapter 3, the narrator apostrophizes Tatiana in her own
Romantic/Sentimental language (emphasis added):
TaTbSHa, MHias TaTbaHa!

C To601 Tenepb S cje3bi j.bIo;
TbI B pyKH MOXHOrO THpaHa
YK oTTaJIa cyab6y CBOIo.
HorH6HemE, MHJIaI; HO npegAe
TbI 6 ocAenumenbHOUi naaeexc)e
EBaaxeHcmoo meMHoe 30BeIIIb,
TbI nezy XH3HH y3Haemub,
TbI nbemb 60oJue6Hbl1u a iceAlauui. (3.xv)
Tatiana, O my dear Tatiana!

I shed with you sweet tears too late;
Relying on a tyrant's honor,
You've now resigned to him your fate.
My dear one, you are doomed to perish;
But first in dazzling hope you nourish
And summon forth a somber bliss,
You learn life's sweetness ... feel its kiss,
And drink the draught of love's temptations.
It should be pointed out that the task of determining from a single passage
of free-indirect discourse (such as I have just quoted) whether a narrator is
expressing irony or sympathy regarding his character is notoriously diffi-

cult. Moreover, the structure of the Onegin stanza builds in routine ironic
reversals in the concluding couplet. Such judgment calls are less risk-laden,
however, when measured against the narrator's tone overall. The above
passage is preceded by a digression on the soporific qualities of Sentimental
and Romantic literature in general- the same literature according to which
Tatiana patterns her relationship with Onegin. Hence in this passage, the
Sentimental vocabulary in the narrator's voice is sensed as ironic.
The most significant aspect of Tatiana's psychological presentation in the
first part of the novel is of course her letter. Although stylized and translated,
it is the first extended self-expression of a character's thoughts, which will be
repeated by Eugene in chapter 8. In general, Tatiana is an extremely literate
and literary character. After the narrator's apophatic description of her, she
is defined by the eighteenth-century Sentimentalism whose heroines become
models of behavior. She enters this well-established epistolary role, and
declares her literarily inspired ardor in a billet-doux to Eugene.10
Let us consider in more detail the genre of the letter both as communica-
tion act and as self-expression. First of all, the genre of the epistolary novel
as practiced by Richardson, Rousseau, and countless others in the eigh-
teenth century was not only wildly popular but also a landmark in literary
psychological description. Through self-analysis and self-presentation, these
authors discovered a new form of character portrayal, anticipating later
Realistic psychological character presentation. The drawbacks of the episto-
lary form are obvious and many - the implausibility of such incessant writ-
ing, its prolixity and repetition- but although the genre, as Walter Raleigh
writes, "inaugurated a century and a half of hyperasthesia" (161), it moti-
vated the revelation of a character's subjective inner life. The epistolary
novel revealed and succeeded in tracking the minute movements of con-
sciousness with heretofore incomparable detail. What differentiates this
method from later Realistic psychological descriptions is Realism's individu-
ation of character. In Sentimentalism, all characters are perceived as emanat-
ing from a single consciousness, the author's, which is the only one truly
present. One senses Richardson's own sensibility in all of the correspondents
of Pamela [1740], Clarissa [1748], and Sir Charles Grandison [1753], and in
Mme. de La Fayette's La Princesse de Cloves [1678] the author's psyche is in
all three characters of the love triangle."
In Onegin, Pushkin employs the letter as a vehicle for Tatiana's psycho-
logical presentation, and she becomes the first character of the novel al-
lowed direct, unmediated self-expression. The letter presents a truthful and
detailed picture of the inner life of a young woman in love. In 1824 Pushkin
wrote to Prince Vyazemsky about Tatiana's letter, "But even if the meaning
is not clear, that makes the letter all the more truthful; it is a letter written
by a woman in love, and what is more she is seventeen" (PSS 13: 403). At
least one of Pushkin's contemporary reviewers thought Pushkin had al-

ready mastered the epistolary genre in this, his first attempt. In one of the
first published reviews of chapter 3, P. I. Shalikov wrote about Tatiana's
letter (emphasis in original):
The poet is a moral Promethean who without the slightest effort takes into his heart feelings
that do not belong to him and who appropriates the other [chuzhoe] as if there were no other
for him in the whole world. (Vatsuro and Fomichev 329)12
Shalikov points to the method of Sentimental character portrayal in gen-

eral: the author/narrator presents a character's inner life as if it were his
own. But while this is true of Onegin and Lensky, Tatiana manages to elude
the grasp of the overarching narrative voice.
Besides its first-person form, another significant aspect of the letter is its
deviation from the form of the rest of the novel. Departing from the
Onegin stanza at first tentatively and then wholeheartedly, the letter is cast
in seventy-nine lines of freely rhyming iambic tetrameter verse. The non-
observance of the Onegin stanza strikes the reader forcefully whenever it
occurs (three times). As Tynianov notes in his Formalist study of Onegin:
as long as the constructive factor of a work remains constant (here, the
Onegin stanza), narrative digressions from the fabula will not be sensed as
digressive. In Tatiana's letter, we do have a departure from the form;
whatever its "original" language and ultimate truth value, we sense its
content as differently voiced, paced, and mediated. The letter individuates
Tatiana's consciousness and distinguishes it from the others. Through a
combination of first-person self-expression and constructive deviation,
Pushkin creates a consciousness that is meant to appear different in form
and depth from the other consciousnesses of the novels.
As Tatiana matures and emerges from her youthful Sentimental world
view, the narrator's attitude toward her alters as well. In the later parts of
Onegin, the narrator's voice approaches Tatiana's - he becomes more sym-
pathetic and less ironic, and begins to narrate from her viewpoint and reflect
her mood. In the following passage from chapter 7, Tatiana has been re-
jected by Eugene, her future brother-in-law has been killed, and her sister
has all too blithely decamped with another suitor. Note how the narrative
style reflects Tatiana's mood - at first passionate, then sad and sober - as
she makes her way through the woods to Onegin's former lodgings:
H B OAHHOqeCTBe >KeCTOKOM
CuibHee crpacrb ee ropHrT,
H 06 OHerHHe gaJIeKoM
EA cepAue rpoMqe roBopHT.
OHa ero He 6ygeT BHseTb;
OHa OJiDKHa B HeM HeHaBHReTb
Y6Hitly 6paTa cBoero;

Ho3T norH6 ... HO y)K ero
HHKTO He IOMHHT, yK JlpyroMy
Ero Heaecra oT?anJacb
KaK JbIM no He6y rony6oMy,
O HeM lsa cepgla, MOKeT 6bITb,
Erue rpycTT ... Ha qTO rpyTrHTb?. .
EBbi seBep. He6o MepmIo. BogbI
CTpyHUIHcb THXO. )KyK yacxKan.
Yx pacxoAHncb xopoBoEbI;
YXK 3a peKOfi, gbIMacb, nbrian
OroHb pbl6aIHA. B none qHCTOM,
JIyHbI npH cBeTe cepe6pHcroM,
B CBOH Me'TbI norpyxKeHa,
TaTba Ha jonro tuna onHa.
IIIja, IIia. IH BApyr nepeq co6oio
C XOnMa rocnoacKHfi BHAHT AOM,
CeieHbe, poiiy nog XOnMOM
H cag Ha; cBeTJnoIO peKoIo.
OHa rjIsiHT - cepgiIe B Heft
3a6Haocb iuaie H cHJlaHekt. (7.xiv, xv)
And in the solitude her passion

Burns even stronger than before,
Her heart speaks out in urgent fashion
Of faraway Eugene the more.
She'll never see him ... and be grateful,
She finds her brother's slayer hateful
And loathes the awful thing he's done.
The poet's gone ... and hardly one
Remembers him; his bride's devotion
Has flown to someone else instead;
His very memory now has fled
Like smoke across an azure ocean.
Two hearts, perhaps, remain forlorn
And mourn him yet.. . . But wherefore mourn? .
'Twas evening and the heavens darkled.

A beetle hummed. The peasant choirs
Were bound for home. Still waters sparkled.
Across the river, smoky fires
Of fishermen were dimly gleaming.
Tatiana walked, alone and dreaming,
Beneath the moonbeams' silver light
And climbed a gentle hill by night.
She walked and walked ... till with a shiver
She spied a distant hamlet's glow,
A manor house and grove below,
A garden by the glinting river.
And as she gazed upon that place
Her pounding heart began to race.
In the last three words of the first stanza, "Na chto grustit'? . . [But where-
fore mourn? . .]," the reader senses Tatiana's voice. The free-indirect dis-
course here is similar to the example cited previously from Joyce, but in the
Onegin passage, all the surrounding words, the whole of these two stanzas,
in fact, seem to express Tatiana's world view. The narrator has modulated
his style- tone, syntax, and vocabulary -to Tatiana's.13 Nowhere does she
speak directly nor does the narrator explain or analyze her inner life, but
by adjusting his style to the character, the narrator describes Tatiana as if
she were speaking, yet more eloquently and powerfully than she could ever
do herself. This is free-indirect discourse - the words are grammatically the
narrator's, yet emotionally the character's. Were they voiced by either the
narrator or Tatiana alone, the powerful effect would be lost. Unlike the
lyric free-indirect discourse we examined concerning Eugene, two voices
resound at the same time. This is a truly double-voiced passage.14
Thomas Shaw (34) points to three phases in the narrator's development -
youthful perceptiveness, disenchantment, and, in the present tense of the
novel, mature re-enchantment. The narrator is able to understand and nar-
rate Eugene's character which is, in Shaw's words, "arrested at the stage of
disenchantment," because he too experienced his own stage of disenchant-
ment, of world-weary Byronism. Tatiana's development, I would argue,
follows a similar, but not identical, pattern. In her stage of youthful enchant-
ment, she idealizes (or completely fantasizes) Onegin by projecting upon
him her Sentimental heroes. At this point, the narrator ironizes Tatiana
(albeit tenderly), as we saw in the passage from chapter 3. In the passage
quoted from chapter 7, Tatiana is in the midst of her disenchantment--
reality has not lived up to her ideals--yet it does not take the form of
Onegin's cynicism, which, as Tatiana soon sees in her visit to Onegin's
library, is likewise literarily inspired. Tatiana's disenchantment with the
world is much more reflective, sober, and educative.
The narrator's presentations of the cognitive lives of Onegin and Tatiana
differ accordingly. The mental lives of both characters emerge through
free-indirect discourse, but only in Tatiana's section do we sense the voice
of both character and narrator simultaneously. Eugene's character, we re-
call, emerged from the single-voiced lyric and a confusion of vocal origins.
Tatiana's psychic life is different in kind from Onegin's. His cynical By-
ronism is an aphoristic view of life best expressed by aphoristic, sententious
language.
Tatiana's psychology, being more complex, requires different expression.
Her early enchantment was also a kind of "lyricism": a Sentimental world
view ironized by the narrator early on. Toward the end of the novel, how-
ever, we encounter a heroine with a view on the world tempered by the
"reality" of everyday life, the "prose" of life that often (in Onegin at least)
exposes the lyric world view as unable to perceive and adequately engage the
intricacies that complicate life.15 Whereas Onegin's character and psychic

life are best expressed by single-voiced, aphoristic "lyrical" language,
Tatiana's character emerges from a multi-voiced, more narratively-oriented
language which endows her with a more complex character, one more at-
tuned to fictional, narrated reality.16 In chapter 7 and 8, the narrator time
and again enters Tatiana's voice zone and narrates from her viewpoint. Not
only do Tatiana's mood and character emerge from the combination of
voices, but they come to dominate and shape the texture of the narrative
itself, and the narrator's sympathy toward Tatiana becomes clear from the
overall tone of the final part of Onegin.
Let us now return to Eugene and his fate at the end of the novel. In the
final chapter, we encounter a new, love-struck and pensive Onegin and,
correspondingly, a new presentation of his inner life. Indeed, in the final
chapter, the narrator endows Eugene not with a single lyric voice, but with
a multi-faceted narrative one. Onegin too, finally, has outgrown his own
youthful (that is, prematurely aged) and naive world view. He is no longer
a lyric personality projected onto the surface of prose, blind to the world's
multifaceted nature. Now his previous universally valid, aphoristic lyrics
cannot narrate his new experience of complex, prosaic life. In chapter 8
almost every bit of narration describing Eugene is double-voiced:
OH OCTaBJIqeT payT TecHbIi,

gOMOi 3aAyMMHB ejeT OH;
Me'Tofi TO rpycTHOf, TO npejiecTHof
Ero BCTpeBOeKH nO3IHHfi COH.
rIpocHyJIc OH eMy npHHOCRT
rlHcbMo: KHI3b H nOKOPHO npOCHT
Ero Ha Benep. <Boxe! K Hef! ..
O 6y 6yy6yny!> H cKopefi
MapaeT OH OTBeT yITHBbIi.
TITO C HHM? B KaKOM OH CTpaHHOM CHe!
TITO IeBeJIbHynOCb B rIy6HHe
ymIIH XOJIOJHOf H neHHBOA?
J)ocaaa? cyeTHocTb? HJIb BHOBb
3a6oTa IKHOCTH- JIo6oBb? (8.xxi)
He left the rout in all its splendor

And drove back home, immersed in thought;
A swarm of dreams, both sad and tender,
Disturbed the slumber that he sought.
He woke to find, with some elation,
Prince N. had sent an invitation.
"Oh God! I'll see her ... and today!
Oh yes, I'll go!" -and straight away
He scrawled a note: he'd be delighted.
What's wrong with him? . . . He's in a daze.
What's stirring in that idle gaze,
What's made that frigid soul excited?
Vexation? Pride? Or youth's old yen

For all the cares of love again?17
The narrator gives expression to Eugene's inner turmoil by speaking with the
latter's emotional diction. The interrogatives and exclamations are from
Onegin's voice zone, but unlike his previous internal voice, this one is
grounded in the world of the novel. Such sympathetic passages where the
narrator narrates from the character's point of view are so numerous in chap-
ter 8 that they create a new forward-pressing, psychological image of One-
gin. He is now a character no longer able to express himself lyrically, which
was for him a facile genre. In short, he has entered the realm of Tatiana.
Finally, let us look at the evolution of the narrator. By the end of the
novel, he too has evolved. No longer is he the vociferous, dominating, and
quasi-manic presence from chapter 1, continually thrusting himself to the
fore. Like Tatiana and Eugene, he has become more subdued and reflec-
tive. We can explain this change, on the one hand, from a strictly narrative
standpoint: to present a sober, unironized image of Tatiana by mixing his
voice with hers, the narrator's own voice in the surrounding text must to a
certain degree come to resemble the character's. Were the narrator to
maintain his tone and style from chapter 1, we would, of course, have a
totally different image of Tatiana. This narrative modulation endows Tati-
ana's image with tremendous power and presence. Everyone seems to have
entered Tatiana's voice zone.
When the narrator modulates his voice to resemble Tatiana's, we sense
that it is he who enters her voice zone rather than vice-versa. The narra-
tor's voice no longer creates the impression of a dominating external con-
sciousness that we had sensed in chapter 1. At the end of Onegin, the
narrator loses his protective, gently ironic attitude toward Tatiana. He
approaches Tatiana's manner of speaking, and this change in tone creates
the impression that it is Tatiana's voice that has invaded and modified the
narrator's. Eugene, Tatiana, and the narrator are all somehow different by
the end of the novel, but the paradox of Tatiana is that it is she who
maintains the most continuity throughout and yet who experiences real
change. Hence, she appears to subsume all the other voices which arrange
themselves beneath her authority. Her voice zone and, consequently, her
image have attained the most prominent position in the novel. But in what
does this authority and strength consist?
At the beginning of the final chapter, Tatiana is most overtly identified
with Pushkin's muse:
H BOT OHa B cagy MOeM

BIsHnacb 6apbImHek ye3AHoA,
C neqnajbHoft jyMOI) B oqax,
C 4paHmy3cKOA KHEKKOIO B pyKax.
H HbIHe My3y I BnepBble

Ha cseTCKHi payr npHBoXay. (8.v-vi)
And in my garden she appeared -

A country miss - infatuated,
With mournful air and brooding glance,
And in her hands a French romance.
And now I seize the first occasion

To show my muse a grand soir6e.
At the end of the novel, Tatiana is revealed as the spirit of Pushkin's poetic
inspiration, but she is a poetic spirit qualitatively different from the kind of
poetry associated with Onegin, Lensky, and the narrator, that is, the lyric.
These three male characters inhabit the same voice zone, and through an
interchange of vocal origins, the narrator creates the psychic life of Lensky
and Onegin. With Tatiana, the narrator shares no zone and no voice;
hence, he cannot narrate her thoughts directly. However, by interweaving
his own voice with hers, he penetrates her zone, her poetic aura.
Shaw (35) suggests that the novel stresses the importance of being po-
etic, and Caryl Emerson (1995) along the same lines sees Tatiana as repre-
senting a balanced poetic principle, a verse presence. I would add that
Tatiana's poetic nature is one that has experienced and taken leave of the
lyric view of life, a view in which nothing changes, in which characters and
their utterances are self-sufficient and whole, universal and unchanging.
She is lyric depth that learns to adjust to the arbitrariness and uncertainty
of narrative (life) and to find her own grace within it.
When Eugene passes through life, events do not accumulate and do not
change him. He passes from role to role with no qualitative evolution of
character. See 8.viii, for example, in which Pushkin enumerates Onegin's
roles. Onegin does not mature; he merely changes roles and voices, all of
which are unitary and literary, and when he sees Tatiana's evolution from a
poor, lovesick country girl into the "indifferent princess" and "unapproach-
able goddess" of the Moscow salon, he views her as if she too were playing
a role: "Kak izmenialasia Tat'iana! / Kak tverdo v rol' svoiu voshla! [How
Tatiana has changed! / How firmly she has entered into her own role!]"
(xxvii). But Onegin is wrong. Tatiana is playing no role, but rather living
real "life." This motivates her pragmatic refusal of Onegin at the end.
The ending of the novel disappointed many of Pushkin's contemporary
readers since the hero was neither married nor dead, two conventional
fates. Onegin does not conclude conventionally because Tatiana will not
permit it. She knows and outlines to Eugene the "real-life" toll such marital
infidelity inflicts, and rather than play conventionally, she rejects him. The
roles are reversed at the end, but as the narrator points out, these roles are
not interchangeable:
JII6BH Bce B03paCTbI nOKOpHbI;

Ho IOHbIM, geBCTBeHHbIM cepgiaM
Ee nopbIsbI 6JIaroTBopHbI,
KaK 6ypH BeriHHMe noJnM:
B gowKe cTpacTef OHH cBe)KeiOT,
H 06HOBsJIOTCH, H 3peIOT -
H )XH3Hb MoryLmaaI gaeT
H IIbIImHbIfti BeT H cinaKHfi rimo.
Ho B Bo3pacT no3HHHft H 6ecnnogHbIfi,
Ha noBOpoTe Haminx neT,
IleqaneH cTpacrTH MepTBOf cineg:
TaK 6ypH oceHH xoJInoHoI
B 6onoJOT o6pawiaKIT nyr
H o6HaxaIoT nec BOKpyr. (8.xxix)
To love all ages yield surrender;

But to the young its raptures bring
A blessing bountiful and tender-
As storms refresh the fields of spring.
Neath passion's rains they green and thicken,
Renew themselves with joy, and quicken;
And vibrant life in taking root
Sends forth rich blooms and gives sweet fruit.
But when the years have made us older,
And barren age has shown its face,
How sad is faded passion's trace!
Thus storms in autumn, blowing colder,
Turn meadows into marshy ground
And strip the forest bare all round.
Eugene wants to return to his previous Tatiana, and his lyric view tells him
that he can. The lyric is static; within it, what is past is not really past, but
somehow always freshly accessible. However, the narrative world is now
Tatiana's. She has control, and for such a narratively oriented character,
things past are things gone.
What Tatiana learns and what brings the narrator into her zone is the
value of leaving -of taking leave of a role, giving in to external pressures,
and surrendering to fate: "No sud'ba moia I Uzh reshena [But my fate / Is
already decided]" (8.xlvii). By accepting her immediate circumstances,
Tatiana becomes a real part of somebody's world. On the one hand, she is
identified with a narrative view of the world, one that has forward move-
ment and leaves behind permanent change. On the other hand, she knows
when to leave the literary. We can view her as a balance of life and art, of
fabula and siuzhet. This is what the narrator wants to learn from Tatiana:
how to take leave of the literary. At the end of the novel, the narrator
recasts himself in Tatiana's zone; she is a continuously created character,
but her creator has more to gain by being inside her rather than outside her.
She teaches him:
BJiaxeH, KTO Inpa3AHHK IKH3HH paHo

OCTaBHJI, He OIIHB RO RHa
BoKaja, noJIHoro BHHa,
KTO He ARoenj ee poMaHa
H1 BApyr yMeJi pacCTaTbCa c HHM,
KaK X c OHerHHbIM MOHM. (8.1i)
But blest is he who rightly gauges

The time to quit the feast and fly,
Who never drained life's chalice dry,
Nor read its novel's final pages;
But all at once for good withdrew-
As I from my Onegin do.
To conclude, let us summarize Pushkin's method of creating apparently

psychologically autonomous beings. In the two basic types of psychological
narration employed in Eugene Onegin--lyric and narrative free-indirect
discourse - the author-narrator overtly employs his own persona and con-
sciousness to endow characters with a psychic life. The narrator modulates
his voice, a poetic voice, among different styles and genres, which at differ-
ent points in the novel both corresponds to and helps create a character's
personality and world view. Through the first-person form, Pushkin is able
to project different facets of his poetic personality onto narrated characters
to create psychologically persuasive characters, each with its own dynamics
and internal logic, but which are ultimately based on what Ginzburg referred
to as the "intensely developing unity" of Pushkin's own poetic persona. The
author-narrator is not fundamentally separate from his characters nor is he
fundamentally separate from the real-life Pushkin and extra-textual reality.
Hence, the voices with which he endows his characters resonate beyond the
fictional world.
I have outlined two kinds of cognitive privilege in Eugene Onegin - lyric
and narrative. The former is ostensibly unproblematic direct psychological
expression or access. The latter, by contrast, is somehow mediated by
another consciousness--the narrator's-and, as in the case of Tatiana,
creates the most complex character in the work.
NOTES
1 And perhaps, as Lotman points out, in chapter 5 as a witness to Tatiana's fortune-t

(1980, 268-69).
2 I use the term fabula as distinct from siuzhet as defined by Tomashevskii (136-46).
3 My account of lyric draws on Ginzburg, Olson, Phelan, Cameron, Abrams, Levin
Hamburger.
4 The comparativist Earl Miner points out that the mimetic basis of Western poetics as
expounded by Aristotle is the exception rather than the rule when compared to other
cultural poetics: "All other examples of poetics are founded not on drama, but on lyric.
Western literature with its many familiar suppositions is a minority of one, the odd one
out. It has no claim to be normative" (8).
5 This chronological dualism finds an exact parallel in the more overtly performative arts
such as operatic time: recitative tells the story and therefore has narrative integrity and
forward movement, while aria, as Caryl Emerson writes, "almost begs to be set free from
the plot" (1986, 153, 165).
6 All translations of Onegin are from Falen.
7 In Bakhtin's terminology, this is stylization rather than parody: the author or narrator
introduces an intention "to make use of someone else's discourse in the direction of its
own particular aspirations" (1984, 193).
8 This dynamic proceeds along the lines of T. S. Eliot's third voice of poetry, the voice of
the dramatic character, when the poet "is saying not what he would say in his own person,
but only what he can say within the limits of one imaginary character addressing another
imaginary character" (96).
9 Falen's translation slightly modified.
10 In her monograph on Tatiana, Olga Peters Hasty claims that Tatiana's behavior is "never
convention driven but always individual, motivated from within." This is difficult to
accept, however, in view of the author-narrator's gentle ironizing of Tatiana in the afore-
mentioned clich6d Sentimental diction used to describe Tatiana's inner life. It seems that
it is not until the end of Onegin that Tatiana assimilates and modifies these preexisting
modes of behavior and emerges as, in Hasty's words, "the principle character of Eugene
Onegin" (32).
11 Pushkin's own attitude toward Sentimentalism was mixed. In an article entitled "Journey
from Moscow to St. Petersburg" written between 1833 and 1834, Pushkin writes of
Richardson's Clarissa, "Many readers will agree with me that Clarissa is very wearisome
and dull; nevertheless, Richardson's novel is of exceptional merit" (PSS 11: 244).
12 Pushkin began his own epistolary novel in 1829, Roman vpis'makh [Novel in Letters], but
never completed it.
13 As Pushkin's contemporary, the poet Kiukhelbeker noted "in his eighth chapter the poet
himself resembles Tatiana" (Lotman 1960, 161).
14 See 7.1iii for another example of such narration.
15 Lotman (1966) sees the uncovering of literary conventions by the "prose of reality,"
especially regarding Lensky, as a characteristic feature of Eugene Onegin and an example
of Pushkin's development toward "realism."
16 Tynianov (86) hints at a similar reading of Onegin. By using colloquial intonations, claims
Tynianov, Pushkin creates a thin intonational layer, which makes the narrative itself a
kind of indirect speech.
17 Lotman (1980, 349-57) analyzes the various viewpoints and voices in the first part of
chapter 8.
REFERENCES
Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradit
York: Oxford UP, 1953.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael
Ed. Michael Holquist. Austin, TX: U of Texas P, 1981.
. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapol
U of Minneapolis P, 1984.
Cameron, Sharon. Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre. Baltimore,
London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.
Eliot, T. S. On Poetry and Poets. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd, 1976.

El'sberg, Ia. E. "Pushkin i razvitie realizma v mirovoi literature." Vzaimosviazi i vzaimo-
deistvie natsional'nykh literatur. Moskva: Akademiia Nauk, 1961. 249-67.
Emerson, Caryl. Boris Godunov: Transpositions of a Russian Theme. Bloomington, IN:
Indiana UP, 1986.
"Tatiana." A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature. Ed.
Sona Stephan Hoisington. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1995. 6-20.
Ginzburg, Lidiia. O lirike. Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel', 1974.
Greenleaf, Monika. "Pushkin's Byronic Apprenticeship: A Problem in Cultural Syncretism."
Slavic Review 53.4 (Winter 1994): 382-98.
Hamburger, Kate. The Logic of Literature. Trans. Marilynn Rose. Bloomington, IN: Indiana
UP, 1973.
Hasty, Olga Peters. Pushkin's Tatiana. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1999.
Jakobson, Roman. "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances."
Language in Literature. Ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1987. 95-114.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Alexandria, VA: Time-Life, 1982.
Levin, Iu. I. "Zametki o lirike." Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 8 (1994): 62-72.
Lotman, Iurii. Pushkin: Issledovaniia i materialy. Vol. 3. Moskva-Leningrad: Akademiia
nauk, 1960.
"The Structure of Evgenyj Onegin." Russian Views of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
Trans. and ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington. 92-108. Originally published in Uchenye
zapiski Tartuskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta 184. Tartu, 1966: 5-32.
Roman A. S. Pushkina "Evgenii Onegin:" Kommentarii. Leningrad: Prosveshchenie,
1980.
Miner, Earl. Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature. Princeton,

NJ: Princeton UP, 1990.
Olson, Elder. On Value Judgements in the Arts and Other Essays. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P,
1976.
Pascal, Roy. The Dual Voice: Free Indirect Speech and its Functioning in the Nineteenth-
Century European Novel. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1977.
Phelan, James. "Character Judgment in Narrative and in Lyric: Toward an Understanding of
the Audience's Engagement in The Waves." Style 24.3 (Fall 1990): 408-21.
Pushkin, A. S. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Moskva: Akademiia nauk, 1937-49. 17 vols.
Eugene Onegin. Trans. James Falen. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1990.
Raleigh, Walter. The English Novel. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1894.
Shaw, J. Thomas. "The Problem of Unity of Author-Narrator's Stance in Pushkin's Evgenii
Onegin." Russian Language Journal 35.120 (Spring 1980): 25-42.
Tomashevskii, B. V. Teoriia literatury. Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel'stvo, 1925.
Tynianov, Iurii. "On the Composition of Eugene Onegin." Russian Views of Pushkin's Eugene
Onegin. Trans. and ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1988.
71-90.
Vatsuro, V. E. and S. A. Fomichev, eds. Pushkin v prizhiznennoi kritike, 1820-1827. St.
Petersburg: Gos. pushkinskii teatral'nyi tsentr, 1996.
Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1957.
Zhirmunskii, Viktor. "Baironizm Pushkina kak istoriko-literaturnaia problema." Pushkinskii
sbornik 4: 295-325.

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American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Lyric and Narrative Consciousness in Eugene Onegin

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages is collaborating

Craig Cravens, The University of Texas at Austin

In his comments on Eugene Onegin, Bakhtin considers Pushkin's

SEEJ, Vol. 46, No. 4 (2002): p. 683-p. 709 683

another feature of Onegin, which distinguishes it from conventional first-

ii. Lyric and Narrative

The first sentence is a standard narrational description, whereas the two

iii. The Lyric3

conception of poetry in general as non-mimetic became widespread during

iv. Lyric in the Novel

speaker expresses a lyrical, subjective attitude. Most Russians, for exam-

KTO XKH H MbICJIHJI, TOT He MOKCeT

Boaibmyro npenecrb pa3roBopy.

He who has lived as thinking being

"Poor Yorick! MOJIBHI OH yHbIJIO,

"Poor Yorick!" then he murmured, shaking,

Lensky's direct discourse is, of course, signaled by the quotation marks. In

H TaM Ke HanIIHCblO neqaJnbHoi

lo TafgHOfi BoJe npOBHgeHb6,

And then with verse of quickened sadness

The stanza continues the lament of the passing of generations begun by

rIOKaMecTb ynHBaftTecb elo,

So meanwhile, friends, enjoy your blessing:

Still stir my heart at times to flight:

H ibe-HH6y/6b OH cepxge TpOHeT;

And may it touch some heart with fire;

HH KpacoToA ceCTpbI CBOel,

Neither with her sister's beauty

Such negative physical characterization suggests qualities of Tatiana that

14 Me)Iy TeM gymua B Heft HbIJIa,

And all the while her soul was aching,

To glance behind her; on she pushes -

Notice how the two exclamations grammatically voiced by the narrator

TaTbSHa, MHias TaTbaHa!

Tatiana, O my dear Tatiana!

expressing irony or sympathy regarding his character is notoriously diffi-

least one of Pushkin's contemporary reviewers thought Pushkin had al-

Shalikov points to the method of Sentimental character portrayal in gen-

Y6Hitly 6paTa cBoero;

And in the solitude her passion

'Twas evening and the heavens darkled.

intricacies that complicate life.15 Whereas Onegin's character and psychic

OH OCTaBJIqeT payT TecHbIi,

He left the rout in all its splendor

Vexation? Pride? Or youth's old yen

H BOT OHa B cagy MOeM

H HbIHe My3y I BnepBble

And in my garden she appeared -

And now I seize the first occasion

JII6BH Bce B03paCTbI nOKOpHbI;

To love all ages yield surrender;

BJiaxeH, KTO Inpa3AHHK IKH3HH paHo

But blest is he who rightly gauges

To conclude, let us summarize Pushkin's method of creating apparently

1 And perhaps, as Lotman points out, in chapter 5 as a witness to Tatiana's fortune-t

Eliot, T. S. On Poetry and Poets. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson Ltd, 1976.

Miner, Earl. Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature. Princeton,

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